Increasing Your Managerial Effectiveness!

A significant fraction of my client pool is managers—from first-level managers to senior executives. Most of them have the same lament: They do not have enough time to manage their responsibilities as they spend too much of their time fighting fires and attending meetings. When I hear this time and again, I am forced to conclude one thing: as managers they have not really understood what their role is and they have focused on the wrong priorities in carrying out their jobs.

As I have said in my previous blogs, a manager’s role is primarily to carry out the four functions of managing: Leading, Planning, Organizing, and Setting up Controls. If they are not paying attention to carrying out these functions (and their associated tasks within these functions) then they are doing technical work. Technical work never ends and the more you do in lieu of doing the management work that you are required to do, the more you are deferring the right management work that actually frees you from doing the never-ending technical work that you are forced to do, instead.

Let me explain:

Undone or poorly done technical work redounds as fires that rage around you and that demand immediate and preemptive attention. For example, a customer complaint about missing functionality of a newly released product requires immediate attention because the customer has just called the CEO, and she has now come down on you to attend to this complaint immediately. Obviously, you drop everything and attend to this complaint and find the right people to work on it until the complaint is resolved. In the process you have disrupted the workflow of many people within your chain of command and outside.

If you now look at the source of the complaint in the first place you will realize that the missing functionality occurred because you did not have a fully vetted test plan (your management job). If you did, then you would have uncovered the missing functionality and come to realize that it was a result of making an end-run on the schedule to ship before the deadline, a management function. Thus, an ignored management task—taking the time to install the promised functionality before shipping—has now resulted in a firefighting urgency that has preempted your attention to take care of this complaint, which could have been avoided by taking one the two courses of actions:

The first one would have been to take the time to have the complete functionality prior to the product release. This is a management choice one makes and delays the release to avoid customer escalations. The other choice would have been to let the customer know of the deficiency prior to release, and then discuss a recovery plan to install that functionality post-release, so that the expectant customer does not react with a surprise upon receiving the product. Both of these are management tasks, but by not taking care of them in a timely way you have devolved them into technical fires at the most inopportune times.

So, the lesson here is that undone or ignored management tasks redound as technical fires, which preempt organizational resources without an end in sight.

So, what are some of the rules to follow to avoid this endless cycle of firefighting and the ensuing stress? Here are my suggestions:

1. Understand the difference between technical work and management work. For example, Developing people is one of the tasks under the function of Leading. You can develop your people by solving their problems, but when you do you become their handrail. Instead, if you learn how to mentor them by not solving their problems, you have empowered them to be independent. Now you have mastered the management task of developing your people so that they can be independent.
2. Understand the management work that only you can do. Delegate everything else. This also avoids having to have endless meetings with your reports, which often stems from trying to get a handle of technical work.
3. Know what management work is and do it without making your technical work its proxy. Because of its familiarity and certainty of outcome many managers prefer to do technical work in lieu of doing the right management work. By increasingly doing more management work one can become equally expert at doing the highly leveraged management work.
4. No amount of technical work can make up for undone management work. If you do not do the appropriate management work when it is due, you’ll pay for it forever in firefighting. In its ultimate manifestation you might even lose your job! And, if you do, because of this action (or inaction) then somebody above you is doing their management job correctly!
5. If you consciously decide to defer certain work, such as deleting functionality in a product about to be released, for example, make sure that you assess its impact and work proactively to prevent surprises as a result of making this choice. It is these surprises that erupt into fires that must be dealt with preemptively. Once again, doing this at the right time, at the right level, and in right way are management tasks.

We all can greatly reduce our overall workload—and stress—if we understand how the management process works. By surrendering to the environment in which we work we often become its victims and suffer as a result.

Good luck!